I'd like to see the IMC gather as many MIME MUAs as possible (regardless
of IMC membership), test them against the MIME conformance rules in RFC
2049 and generate an industry MIME report card listing percentage of
conformance to each rule (without naming names).
This sounds reasonable, if not difficult. I can easily test MUAs under
MS-DOS, Win 3.1, Win 95, MacOS, and some free Intel-based Unixes, but don't
have other capabilities easily at hand. Since we're not naming names, I
don't think this is a problem.
Vendors who failed
conformance rules would be notified privately.
No problem there
Where I do have a problem is deciding what rules to test, and what are
"correct" results. The ietf-822 list doesn't seem like the best place to
discuss this, so I propose setting up another mailing list to specify what
should be tested and what the acceptable/unacceptable results should be.
If others on this list think the test is a good idea, I can go ahead with
it and with a list for people to list tests. BTW, don't forget to look at
RFC 1844.
--Paul Hoffman, Director
--Internet Mail Consortium